


Burial Of Bones

by laughingpineapple



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Dreams, Gen, canonical underage sex, honest to goodness there's an actual plot beside all these canon-compliant tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-30
Updated: 2016-09-30
Packaged: 2018-08-18 16:39:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8168741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: B.O.B.: a warning onto itself. And Bobby Briggs, on overcoming a deep shadow and finding the road that leads back to his half of a long-promised embrace.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for /r/twinpeaks' TSHoTP contest, with Garland's vision as its prompt.

** 1\. A direct consequence of sex **

 

“You will,” says the man perched on Laura's body, still lying naked on the blanket Bobby spread on the ground of the abandoned barn. Bobby is fourteen, he's just become a man, just got his heart broken like a man, and he's not about to listen to this stranger who crouched down like a denim-wrapped vulture to take his girl from him. But when he takes in air to tell him off, he finds it scratchy and broken, like the man's words, and it would take a great and ominous power (like the man’s) to coerce that mass into linear language. _He will._ No other truth can be uttered to contest that order. Underneath him, Laura laughs again, harder and harder, splintered and backwards as well, until the whole  barn shrieks with her.

“Bury! Our! Bones!” the man yells.

  


Bobby wakes up slouched on a sofa. Birds are already chirping, meaning football practice can't be that far away; it's funny, someone must have left an old record playing. Did his old man hold secret dance parties in the night? That's a mental image for posterity. His thoughts are interrupted by a clapping of hands, noises sputtered by a voice Bobby has never heard, imitating bird calls. 

Is this really home? Curtains rustle in the darkness.

“Do you know what your name is?” the voice says, unnatural, all the pauses in the wrong places. “He knows. He wants an arm too!”

Then the voice laughs, like Laura. Something must be terribly amusing to someone, somewhere.

  


Bobby wakes up in the darkness. 

“Fuck,” he says, testing the air. It's his voice again. “Fuck. If this is what adulthood’s like, count me out. No wonder everyone’s nuttier than a snack bar.”

  


Bobby wakes up and holds his breath, waiting to wake up again, and again, and again.

  


  


** 2\. On the day Bobby Briggs shoots a man  **

 

“You will bury our bones.”

They are in the barn again, Bobby and the man with the long grey hair. The floor is gone, leaving the rich soil naked under their feet, and once Bobby’s eyes get used to the dim light, he can see the corpse of the dealer he shot a few hours earlier (feels like a lifetime ago, a life when he hadn't killed a man and could hold onto a gun to feel powerful), lying on the ground with a hole still smoking in his chest. Yes. Yes he will bury this, he will bury the body and never think about this day again in his entire life. Let's get it over with.

  


Laura watches him sweat and dig. She is wearing black, like at a wake, or when you don't feel like you are a part of the day, and she is much older than the Laura Palmer Bobby knows, with glimmering eyes framed by a thin web of wrinkles. A pinecone burns on the palm of her raised hand. Its flames light up her hair and a smile Bobby cannot read, except for the fact that it is sad, but that's just how it is - all of Laura's smiles are sad.

“Sorry,” she says. “It's like all cats end up dead by the roadside.”

Covering the pinecone with her other hand, dimming its light, she takes a step backward and gets swallowed by thick curtains which were never there. The walls of the barn remain naked and empty after her passage, no windows, no door, not for him. His dreams end along this perimeter.

  


On the following day, when, holding his left arm that feels stiff and rotten after hours in the gym, he finally tells the real Laura about his dream and the glowing woman in it, how she was unscathed by the fire, and about the pinecone, and her sympathy, she laughs at that nonsense: Laura Palmer will never get that old.

 

 

** 2.5. Still over cocaine **

 

It happens again a few years later, he goes through the same motions, another shot another shocking case of self-defense, a mirror and a double, another body to hide in the night, but he and Laura are too distant and too high to talk about it, and the memory is lost to the day. There was a pinecone here too, a small sad one for sad Laura laughter, but that happened the other day when they were awake, he thinks, he's almost sure, not in this recurring, asphyxiating dream that's making his entire life feel like it's surrounded by four rickety walls.

Did he kill Mike? What does it even mean?

  


  


** 3\. On the day he admits his complicity in Laura Palmer's death, his and everyone else’s in town, bunch of raging hypocrites that they are **

 

It's Laura, wrapped in plastic.

Bobby finds her lying on the dark soil of his dream, naked and bound like the news said she died. It's not fair, it's just not fucking fair. They didn't even give her a musty scrap of privacy.

“Follow the pact.”

Bobby turns toward the grey-haired man, and maybe today he'll be strong enough to articulate the words that are bubbling in his throat - insults, first, because Bobby Briggs won't be ordered around, then questions - but he's gone again, leaving him alone with the corpse. How many times will they have to bury her? If he does it himself, will it last?

As he steps forward, Laura scatters into so many pieces, pierced and cut by dumb cops who could only paste her back as the sum of her parts and nothing more. Bobby needs to step back to see her as whole (which is still not the same as being able to say that he understood her, he knows). He reaches forward to touch her and she's a broken puzzle again. Story of their lives, isn't it right, Laura? So Bobby digs until morning, a grave as wide as the barn, so that all of her can fit inside.

  


He wakes up so very tired.

  


  


** 4\. Not long afterwards **

 

He won't do this.

That's his father's coffin lying in the middle of the floorless ground and his father deserves better, fanfares, state funerals, probably some priest thrown in the mix too, a whole flock of priests, father always loved those. Bobby won't let him be forgotten under a dark room, surrounded by the twisting woods that he knows - he _knows_ \- lie in wait outside. It's a shitty fate (sorry, Laura). Bobby lagged behind his father's footsteps all his life, he never got him, he'd like to take this inadequacy and shove it six feet under but he owes him this one.

“Bury our bones.” 

It's just a whisper now, even though it carries the same ferocious urgency that defines every word and gesture of the man with the long grey hair. It settles under Bobby's skin and pulls. His body obeys. There are too many bones growing under the soft earth and his own got lost in the shuffle: finger to wrist and ankle to knee, it's not his body anymore. He does as he is told, like Laura told him, like Leo told him, like Jacques told him.

“Dad,” he cries as he lowers the coffin. “I didn't want to disappoint you one last time.”

His words get lost in that static-heavy air, but for one moment, they rang and they rang true.

  


  


** 5\. Growing up **

 

“Remember the pact.”

The order rings in Bobby's ears for months on end. Every night, he is alone in the barn when the man visits him and repeats his words with growing hunger. Clean walls, no way out. Every morning, Bobby wakes up with a dreadful lump in his throat and the growing certainty that, lacking anymore convenient deaths in the family, he will have, once again, to provide a body himself. Then another? Why are people allowed to do this to each other and why was he, Bobby Briggs, ever allowed to do anything at all. Once, long ago, he was told that this, too, would pass, and that he would soon share in his father's bright light. Gleaming marble, a palazzo of fantastic proportions – it was a nice promise to hold on to, a drive to leave his past behind and resist the pull of old mistakes, but so much for that. All he’s got is a rickety barn.

 

  


** 6\. On the day he gets his badge **

 

“Bury our bones.”

Bending, eventually, after years of struggling, to the voice's order, Bobby gets on his knees and digs until his hands are raw. On the surface, he finds fossils of years long gone, mistakes made by a scared kid. He goes deeper. More mistakes. Like geological strata, the sediments of cocaine and all the years he went clear. A premonition of curtains. More layers, a mantle of fire. Roadkill. Laura's death beating like an old wound, Laura's life still bleeding into his own. He wonders, briefly, where the lady with the pinecone is these days, if she made it. Bark. He gets to the bottom.

Bury our bones, the man said. 

“Baby, you bet.” 

As a matter of fact, he just did. Bobby Briggs lays down in the hole he has dug for himself, looks up at the distant, shaggy ceiling and rests. Clumps of earth fall back on his chest. This is his last tribute. No more.

He dares to think that maybe Garland would be proud of his choice. Maybe Laura, too. 

  


  


** 7\. After years in which his dreams were dirt, burrowing tunnels in the dirt, as black as the corners of a stage when the spotlight’s trained on the veil ahead **

 

And years spent coasting a procession of red curtains, holding onto them like a hiker treading a steep cliff, never crossing through, never looking back, Greek harp dude was a loser and Bobby could do one better (the memories of the people he met on that trail never lasted until morning. Even at the crack of dawn, many of them had no name)

 

And the one time he crossed a little man in red, who, finding him inordinately funny, told him that he was off his hands and at arm's length, and to be wary of old friends

 

And years lost in the dream of the mountains, guided only, on the clearest nights, by the dark far-away shape of a deer

 

Bobby Briggs, plaid shirt billowing in the wind, finds himself walking down a dirt road on the slopes of a valley that looks like home.  He can breathe. He sees, agaist the rising sun, the palace he has been searching since his youth, and feels an old emotion stir in his chest. His father is waiting beyond those doors. Bobby hurries his step.


End file.
